Where are they when we need them? News reports of James Holmes's deadly assault in Aurora, Colorado, should call to question the federal government's failure to get an inkling of Holmes's preparations to inflict mass terror.

Freedom Watch Sophisticated First Amendment scholars, lawyers, and media commentators, all of whom are strongly free-speech/free-press supporters, were critical of Coakley for allegedly engaging in a legal bluff — the veiled threat of possible prosecution under the state's child-porn statute — to convince Portnoy to remove the offending and exploitative image from his site.

Another year of crushing free spirits at our colleges and universities Law school is not known for being fun, so some professors spice instruction with far-fetched hypotheticals. To some students at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, one longtime criminal-law prof's hypos went too far.

Freedom Watch The sentencing memorandum filed by Boston federal prosecutors last week, seeking between 33 and 41 months of incarceration for convicted former Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner, is no ordinary document.

Freedom watch Racial profiling meets war on terror: The highest federal court in New England has said it’s okay for government officials single out dark-skinned people for searches, as long as they can concoct some cover rationale, ginned up with vague allusions to terrorism.

Can I get a witness The Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts made a pronouncement last week that, to rational citizens, should be obvious: it's a bad idea for the state to be complicit in a scheme to pay criminal trial witnesses for their testimony — and for those witnesses to receive a bonus if the defendant is convicted.

Harvard and Yale once again lead the way . . . for academic censorship Harvard and Yale universities felt the sting of the global economic collapse firsthand in 2009, as the endowments of these stalwart New England Ivy League members dropped by nearly a third. The schools didn’t fare much better in the free marketplace of ideas, either.

Freedom watch A case of high-school bullying in South Hadley ended in tragedy this past January when the alleged victim, a freshman girl, committed suicide. Now, ramped up by the outrage over the case, Massachusetts legislators are in danger of enacting a politically correct law that could have devastating effects on our free speech.

Freedom Watch Last Thursday's Supreme Court opinion striking down corporate campaign advertising restrictions might as well have been divorce papers in the rocky marriage between the political left and the First Amendment.